Vote for a Spoiler? Every Vote Counts

Every Vote Counts

The “Spoiler” Factor

This article originally appeared as a guest editorial in the Washington Post. The author is vice-president of the pro-democracy Center for Voting and Democracy

by Matthew Cossolotto

With Ralph Nader’s nomination as the Green Party’s presidential candidate and the likelihood that Pat Buchanan will win the Reform Party nomination, there is increasing talk about these candidates as potential “spoilers” in the presidential race. But as interesting as it may be to speculate about how much support Ralph Nader could siphon from Al Gore, especially in a key state such as California, or how many votes Pat Buchanan could deny George W. Bush, the discussion misses a very important point. The real “spoiler” in the presidential race is the outmoded voting system we use to elect presidents and most other officials.

Our voting system is a winner-takes-all, plurality system. In essence, the candidate with the most votes wins, even if that candidate gets less than 50 percent of the vote. In our presidential elections, of course, we complicate matters by grafting on a rather bizarre electoral college system. This creates a series of individual, state-by-state contests in which the candidate with a plurality of votes in a given state wins all of its electoral college votes.

So our presidential elections boil down to 50 separate state-level elections. This fact fuels the “spoiler” speculation because, by being particularly strong in one state, a given candidate can affect the outcome of the national election.

But here’s the interesting point: If we changed the voting system, which after all is not mandated by the Constitution, minor-party or independent candidates would cease to be potential spoilers. They could immediately be seen in a more positive light, as champions of particular groupings of voters or political philosophies that add to our political debate.

Let me stipulate here that I am a big fan of multiparty democracy. I support having more than two major parties competing actively and aggressively for elective office. We suffer from a deficit of diversity at the polls, and that has the effect of dampening turnout and turning people off to politics-as-usual.

The answer isn’t to be found in simply putting more candidates or parties on the ballot. The reality is, trying to run a multiparty democracy within the limited confines of a plurality voting system can create some perverse incentives. For instance, some Democrats cheered when Pat Buchanan broke from the Republican Party last year, just as some conservatives have been promoting the candidacy of Ralph Nader in an attempt to split the vote on the “Left” and hand victory to Bush. This kind of “divide-and-conquer” politics is a dreadful way to run a democracy. People end up spending too much time gaming the current system instead of reforming it.

The good news is that viable alternatives to plurality elections abound. Two-round elections, in which one vote is a runoff, are used in most of the world’s presidential races. But a better change could be implemented right now by the states. It’s called “instant runoff voting,” or IRV. Under IRV, which is currently used to elect the president of Ireland and the mayor of London, voters simply rank the candidates (1, 2, 3) in order of preference. In the coming presidential race, some voters on the left would be able to rank Nader first and Gore second. On the right, a good number of voters might very well rank Buchanan first and Bush second.

If a candidate wins an outright majority of first-preference votes, the count is over and that candidate is declared the winner. But if not, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and ballots cast for that candidate are counted for their next-choice candidates.

The result of this simple change in the voting system is to allow people to vote affirmatively for their candidate of choice without wasting their votes outright or handing the election to a candidate with whom they strongly disagree. It empowers voters while making major-party candidates less vulnerable to spoilers.

Proportional allocation of electoral college seats–on a state-by-state basis–would also address the spoiler problem. This plan, advocated by both Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon during their presidencies, would also permit voters to express their true preferences at the polls.

A state can change the way it votes for president virtually overnight through a simple statute. The long-term health of our democracy suffers from our present system. It’s time to change it and make American democracy safe for diversity.

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

in part the Great Green Tax Shift maxed out. Economically, taxing pollution and depletion does reduce pollutants and extracts – and thus the tax base; plus such taxes are regressive, requiring a safety net. On the other hand, collecting site rent is progressive and generates a revenue surplus payable as a dividend to residents, which can serve as the safety net. Environmentally, taxes on waste and extraction do not drive efficient use of land, as does getting site rent.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old log-gers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

a new field of study offered in place of economics, as astronomy replaced astrology and chemistry replaced alchemy. Conventional economics, in which GNP can do well while people suffer, is a bit too superstitious for my renaissance upbringing. If I’m to propitiate unseen forces, it won’t be inflation or “the market”; let it be theEgyptian cat goddess. At least then we’d have fewer rats. Meanwhile, believing in reason leads to a new policy, also christened geonomics. That’s the proposal to share (a kind of management, the “nomics” part) the worth of Mother Earth (the “geo” part). If our economies are to work right, people need to see prices that tell the truth. Now taxes and subsidies distort prices, tricking people into squandering the planet. Using land dues and rent dividends instead lets prices be precise, guiding people to get more from less and thereby shrink their workweek. More free time ought to make us happy enough to evolve beyond economics, except when nostalgic for superstition.

an answer for Jonathan of the Green Party (Nov 7): “What does ‘share our surplus’ mean?”Our surplus is the values that society generates synergistically. It’s the money we spend on the nature we use: on land sites, natural resources, EM spectrum, ecosystem services (assimilating pollutants). It’s also the money we pay to holders of government-granted privileges like corporate charters. We could share it by paying for the nature we use and privileges we hold to the public treasury then getting back a fair share of the recovered revenue. Used to be, owners did owe rent (“own” and “owe” used to be one word). And presently, some lucky residents do get back periodic dividends: Alaska’s oil dividend and Aspen Colorado’s housing assistance. Doing that, instead of subsidizing bads while taxing goods, is the essence of geonomics.
Jonathan: “Is local currency what you mean?”
Editor: It’s not. Community currency is a good reform, but every good reform pushes up site values. That makes land an even more tempting object of speculation. Now, any good will eventually do bad by widening the income gap – until you share land values.

shaped by reality. In the 1980′s, the Swedish government doubled its stock transfer tax. Tax receipts, however, rose only 15%, since traders simply fled to London exchanges. Fearing a further exodus, the Swedish government quickly rescinded the tax altogether. (The New York Times, April 20) That willingness to tax anything leads us astray. Pushing us astray is that unwillingness to pay what we owe: rent for land, our common heritage. Assuming land value is up for grabs, we speculate. We cap the property tax on both land and buildings and the rate at which assessments can go up; while real market values rise quicker, assessments can never catch up. Our stewards, the Bureau of Land Management, routinely sell and lease sites below market value, often to insiders, says the Government Accounting Office. Once we grasp that rent is ours to share, we’ll collect it all, rather than let it enrich a few, and quit taxing earnings, which do belong to the individual earner. That shift is geonomic policy.

more transformation than reform; it’s a step ahead. Harvard economics students this year did petition to change the curriculum, in the wake of the English who caught the dissension from across The Channel. French reformers, who fault conventional economics for conjuring mathematical models of little empirical relevance and being closed to critical and reflective thought, reject this “autism” – or detachment from reality – and dub their offering “post-autistic economics”. Not a bad name, but again, academics define themselves by what they’re not, not by what they are, unlike geonomists. We track rent – the money we spend on the nature we use – and watch it pull all the other economic indicators in its wake. We see economies as part and parcel of the ecosystem, similarly following natural patterns and able to self-regulate more so than allowed, once we quit distorting prices. To align people and planet, we’d replace taxes and subsidies with recovering and sharing rents.

a neologism for sharing “rent” or “social surplus” – the money we spend on the nature we use. When we buy land, such as the land beneath a home, we typically pay the wrong person – the homeowner. Instead, since land cost us nothing to make and is the common heritage of us all, rather than pay the owner, we should pay ourselves, our neighbors, our community. That is, we should all pay land dues to the public treasury, then our government would pay us land dividends from this collected revenue. It’s similar to the Alaska oil dividend, almost $2,000 last year. Indeed, the annual rental value of land, oil, all other natural resources, including the broadcast spectrum and other government-granted permits such as corporate charters, totals several trillion dollars each year. It’s so much that some could be spent on basic social services, the rest parceled out as a dividend, as Tom Paine suggested, and taxes (except any on natural rents) could be abolished, as Thomas Jefferson suggested. Were we sharing Earth by sharing her worth, territorial disputes would be fewer, less intense, and more resolvable.

a way to connect the dots. Making the cyber rounds is “The Cavernous Divide” by Scott Klinger, from AlterNet (posted March 21): “As the number of billionaires in the world expands, so does the number of those in poverty.” Duh. The yawning income gap is not news. Nearly every issue of our quarterly digest carries a similar quote. Yet the connection was worked out long ago by one of America’s greatest thinkers, Henry George, who labeled his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. Techno- and socio-advances always enrich few and impoverish many. Yet progress also pushes up location values – the geonomic insight (is Silicon Valley cheaper now or more expensive?). Instead of taxing income, sales, or buildings, society could collect those values of sites, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services via fees and dues, which would lower the income ceiling, and instead of lavishing corporate welfare, pay out the recovered revenue via dividends, which would jack up the income floor. Dots connected.

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Thoughts for the Day

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

Christopher Reeve

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.

Raymond Lindquist

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never been seen.

Robert Bresson

Man – a being in search of meaning.

Plato

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Zhuangzi

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Thomas Jefferson

Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.